Veit Harlan undeniably deserves Karsten Witte's epithet, "the baroque fascist." He made the loudest, most colorful, most expensive films in the Third Reich as well as Jew Süß, the era's most offensive feature. He remains a director known for crowd scenes, grand parades, bombastic spectacles, and monumental settings. He was also the Third Reich's consummate melodramatist, and critics are keen on rehabilitating him as an unappreciated auteur and a formal master; they concentrate on his manipulation of generic convention and laud his use of color. The Great Sacrifice shows a well-situated husband who strays from a life of privilege and a picture-book marriage to pursue an affair with a mysterious and sickly woman. Their horseback excursions up hills, through forests, and along beaches provide heady escapes from his obligations and her inevitable doom. With its ennui, melancholy, and fatalism, the film becomes a full-blown exercise in morbid abandon. It culminates in a hypnotic demonstration of sickness unto death as another transgressive heroine takes her place in Nazi cinema's gallery of female martyrs.-E.R.